Real Time Polling

A user, @Meezyy, suggests real time polling. It is a nice idea but there's a few hurdles to deal with on this.

The first is not to bog down Twitter with requests. Most people have noticed the past couple of days twitter's been dealing with issues, delayed tweets, delayed direct messages, things appearing sometimes and then disappearing to reappear again later.

The second is not to debilitate our service or your usage of other apps. If you use a client like TwitterBerry, TwitterFon, TwitDroid, etc, you are using API calls. TweetDeck keeps you informed about these. Every account is given 100 API calls per 60 minute timeframe. You use an API call every time you check @replies, direct messages, your personal timeline (twitter.com/yourname), your friends timeline (twitter.com/home), etc. using anything but the twitter.com website. Updating your status doesn't count against this limit. After you use those 100, you're locked out until the time resets. TweetDeck columns won't get refreshed, checking friends/@replies/dms from twitterfon/twitterberry/twitdroid/etc. won't get any new tweets.

FollowWatch polls your followers list once an hour from your account (using 1 of your API calls). It's the reason behind getting your password. Retrieving username info for each of the people that have changed on your friend's list is retrieved through our account. FollowWatch is allowed 20000 calls per 60 minute timeframe as a developer account. While it probably could update in real time by polling more frequently, it wouldn't be able to provide stats for that many people.

Still, if a way existed, it's a feature worth looking into.